Once I was teaching a multivariable calculus class, where I had a group of about 10 students all copying their homework from the same person. It was really easy to see what was going on, as this guy had pretty bad handwriting, and his x's looked just like his 's. If you knew which of the two letters should be there, you could easily recognize them, but there were similar enough so that somebody having no clue and just mindlessly copying would get bunch of them wrong. They would always turn in papers with x's and 's distributed in completely random way. You could even figure out who copied from who, by comparing the papers to each other. It was rather amusing. I corrected the mistakes, but didn't say anything to them. Instead, I picked the problems they most obviously had no clue about, and put the exact same problems on in class exams. Supposedly they had already solved the exact same problems before, so it should have been easy for them. Indeed, the student who actually did the work, as well as couple others that did their homework themselves, did fine on the exams. Everybody else completely failed them. One of the cheaters even had the guts to complain to out department chair that my tests were to hard, because he always had almost full score on the homework (short of the few points deducted for some mysteriously misplaced x's and s) but completely failed the tests. He seemed rather surprised when I showed him that the problems he didn't even know how to start on the exam were exactly the same ones he supposedly solved nearly perfectly on homework. Obviously he didn't even bother to read what he was copying.
It is an effective tool if what is written on the slides is a supplement or "checklist" to cue the presenter on the topics rather than being read word for word.
Question:
Do you really want your "checklist" become the focal point of your whole presentation?
My grade-school math teacher had us do last night's homework on the board.
In many countries, this is a common practice, on all levels, from grade school to university. Some say that you don't really understand something until you actually explain it to somebody.
One day the overhead was broken. Without a blink of an eye he picked up a piece of chalk and began lecturing the old fashioned way, writing down stuff on the blackboard. The prof was transformed from a deadly boring lecturer to an absolutely fascinating speaker. There was much more class interaction and I learned way more in that class than in any previous class.
I think this perfectly illustrates the problem with Powerpoint. When you watch a lecture with blackboard and chalk, you actually see the ideas develop on the board (if the lecturer is doing a good job). The lecturer can go back and emphasize certain parts of the text or graph, circle things, even erase parts of equations and change them to something else, you can actually witness the analytical process the lecture is trying to convey. In addition to that, you will actually see the lecturer in person interact with the text, graphics and data, which I believe can greatly help your learning. Powerpoint just isn't good at emulating that sort of stuff, and that's why I never use it. Sometimes I use various LaTeX presentation packages, that make it relatively easy to do things like develop equations and formulas step by step, emphasize selected parts of equations, build graphs and diagrams step by step etc. It's not perfect, but it's definitely better than what you can do with Powerpoint. Paradoxically, even with all the animations, fancy transitions etc, 99.99% of Powerpoint presentations end up being much more static than a good chalkboard lecture.
There is also another thing that I believe is nicely illustrated by your example. Experts on human learning seem to agree that people learn better if the environment in which they study changes. Which means that a lecturer should every once a while change his or her presentation style. Using slides one day and chalkboard another day, perhaps depending on topic that is covered, can definitely help your students to learn. Too many professors have their own routine (I do too, it's just so easy to do that) they follow each lecture. Students then come to the class, make sure that everything is the way it's "supposed to be", and turn off. They make a routine out of it, too. A sudden change as the one you describe can bring them back, break their routine, and precondition (I hate that word here, but I can't think of anything better right now) them for absorbing the material better. Even if the actual delivery on that day isn't any better, at least it wakes some of the students up!
I completely agree. And that's where I see a problem with Powerpoint. Powerpoint makes it extremely easy to put few bullets on a slide, but it does very little to help you present things like charts, graphs, equations etc in a clear manner. It is not easy to make a diagram that gets revealed step by step, it is not easy to selectively emphasize certain part of a graph or an equation, etc. I am not saying it is not possible in Powerpoint to do these things, but it is not easy, the software is not designed to help you with that. That's why you almost never see people using Powerpoint in that way.
But if you are just going to put couple of extremely brief bullet points on your slides, why don't you just write them on the board? Do you even need powerpoint for that?
are there no other languages designed for extending other applications?
Yes, about zillion od them. My impression is that lua is more powerful than s-lang, easier to learn than scheme, and smaller and more portable than ruby/python/perl.
I remember back in the old DOS days, I had a menu software that heavily relied on this behavior. You would start a batch file, which would invoke the menu program. You would select something from the menu, it would get written into the batch file on the next line after the menu, followed by another line that would restart the batch file again. Then the menu program would exit, passing control back to the batch file.
Did you try Gnumeric? It seems like a logical fit with Abiword. I works pretty well on Windows, except that printing is still messed up on some printers. It prints fine on most printers, but there seem to be several HP printers that gnumeric cannot handle. I don't really use it for statistics, I use R or Python if I have to, but I heard that it is better than excel in that aspect.
Actually, equation editor is one of the few things I absolutely cannot figure out. I mean I can produce equations with it, but it seems like a real pain, and I think I must be doing something wrong. I always tought that microsoft equation editor was the worst possible way to create math equation and formulas. Once I had a part time job working for a textbook publisher, where I had to enter a lot of equation with MS word, and I was cursing it all the way through. However, I now believe that OO's equation editor is even worse that what microsoft came up with
MS does not make you pay extra for equation editor. I think what confuses you is that there is a more powerful version available from a third party, which you have to pay for. I never used it, but people tell me that it is quite good. Supposedly you can even enter LaTeX formulas into it. I would like to see how it compares to LyX.
I personaly use TeX for everything these days. If you are using Windows, give the proTeXt distribution a try. The cd comes with installers for most of the software you need (possibly all, I believe I only had to install Vim that was not included, but you may not need that), and it has an interesting pdf based installation. Basically, you pop in the cd, open a pdf file from it if it doesn't autostart, and follow instructions on the screen. Seemed pretty easy to me. Head over to http://www.tug.org/protext/ and give it a try.
Also, if you are a TUG member, they mail you a proTeXt cd with the latest version every year.
And getting versions and filepaths of anything lined up on Windows is a nightmare. Windows is just a mess in this aspect. One day, when I have nothing to do, I am going to count how many different copies of slightly different versions of Python I have on my work computer. I positively know that there are at least three different versions of ghostsctipt on that machine, and when I need to process some postscript file, I never quite know which one of them is going to start. Just give me good old/usr/bin, please!
Maybe it wasn't exactly CmdrTaco's fault. The piece is so badly written that it's almost unreadable. Aforementioned my ass! I wouldn't blame CmdrTaco for using totally misleading headline, I blame him for simply posting this crap at all!
So shut up or leave are the only options? One isn't alowed to criticise what one sees as a problem in a country one loves, perhaps in hope it will get rectified once enough people point it out? I find your attitude rather similar to that of many hard-line communists. Besides, we are talking about malware created in the US, not targeted to the US.
I think you are onto something here. Looking at all the different countries that could be classified as superpowers in their time makes me think that the length of the time a country remains a superpower must be inversely proportional to the average IQ of its citizens.
I agree, but processes like selective breding are usually much slower, which gives us more time to react to possible problems.
The main problem I have with GM plants and animals is not so much possible toxicity, that's something you can always test for. What I am afraid of is creating new "invasive" plants and animals and introducing them into the environment. There are already enough problems with moving plants and animals between continents. I think the last thing we want to do is creating new possibly invasive organisms, especially those that are designed to be more resistant against natural predators and other hardships.
That was my first reaction, too. Gnome releases used to come with nice detailed release notes, but this time I simply couldn't find them. Very disapointing!
Left wing or Liberals, are by definition a group of people who push change. Right wings or Conservative, are by definition a group of people who want to keep the current method.
That's only true in countries currently ruled by the right wing. In socialist countries, it's the right wing that wants change. Besides, liberals is not the same as left wing. In many countries, those who call themselves liberals support free market, minimal intervention of government in economy etc. These people are typically right of the center, or even right wing. Similarly, concervative does not necesarily mean right wing. I think the term "conservative communist" speaks for itself.
Someone who is more left is more willing to use Linux, just because it is an attempt to push change. Someone who is more right is more willing to use Windows, just because it is what they used before.
What about someone like me who is more willing to use Linux, because it is what I have always used (not completely true, I did use DOS before Linux for a brief period of time, plus several weird mainfraim operating systems, but not really enough for it to count)?
then it should be painfully obvious that if you wish to correct this "shortage" of talent, you'll need to up the pay scale of math and science teachers to make it an attractive career choice.
The reason I don't like it is this: right now, being "certified" as a math teacher brings a great competitive advantage when looking for a job in education. As a result, there are crowds of complete morons who hate math, are really bad at it, but are trying to get through a series of college math classes to get a certification that they can teach math. I happen to teach some of these classes. Typically, out of 30 people in the class, there are two who are actually interested in math. It gets slightly better in higher level classes, but still, there are enough of these idiots to "poison" the entire class. They will never be good math teachers, you need to be interested in the subject and know it well enough in order to be a good teacher. They are just making it incredibly painful not only for the instructors, but especially for the few students who are in the class because they want to learn something. And I am affraid that with these salary advantages for math teachers, things will get even worse.
Slashdot Mirror
Once I was teaching a multivariable calculus class, where I had a group of about 10 students all copying their homework from the same person. It was really easy to see what was going on, as this guy had pretty bad handwriting, and his x's looked just like his 's. If you knew which of the two letters should be there, you could easily recognize them, but there were similar enough so that somebody having no clue and just mindlessly copying would get bunch of them wrong. They would always turn in papers with x's and 's distributed in completely random way. You could even figure out who copied from who, by comparing the papers to each other. It was rather amusing. I corrected the mistakes, but didn't say anything to them. Instead, I picked the problems they most obviously had no clue about, and put the exact same problems on in class exams. Supposedly they had already solved the exact same problems before, so it should have been easy for them. Indeed, the student who actually did the work, as well as couple others that did their homework themselves, did fine on the exams. Everybody else completely failed them. One of the cheaters even had the guts to complain to out department chair that my tests were to hard, because he always had almost full score on the homework (short of the few points deducted for some mysteriously misplaced x's and s) but completely failed the tests. He seemed rather surprised when I showed him that the problems he didn't even know how to start on the exam were exactly the same ones he supposedly solved nearly perfectly on homework. Obviously he didn't even bother to read what he was copying.
Actually, most LaTeX based presentation tools are much more capable than Powerpoint, at least in the areas where it matters.
It is an effective tool if what is written on the slides is a supplement or "checklist" to cue the presenter on the topics rather than being read word for word.
Question:
Do you really want your "checklist" become the focal point of your whole presentation?
My grade-school math teacher had us do last night's homework on the board.
In many countries, this is a common practice, on all levels, from grade school to university. Some say that you don't really understand something until you actually explain it to somebody.
I think this perfectly illustrates the problem with Powerpoint. When you watch a lecture with blackboard and chalk, you actually see the ideas develop on the board (if the lecturer is doing a good job). The lecturer can go back and emphasize certain parts of the text or graph, circle things, even erase parts of equations and change them to something else, you can actually witness the analytical process the lecture is trying to convey. In addition to that, you will actually see the lecturer in person interact with the text, graphics and data, which I believe can greatly help your learning. Powerpoint just isn't good at emulating that sort of stuff, and that's why I never use it. Sometimes I use various LaTeX presentation packages, that make it relatively easy to do things like develop equations and formulas step by step, emphasize selected parts of equations, build graphs and diagrams step by step etc. It's not perfect, but it's definitely better than what you can do with Powerpoint. Paradoxically, even with all the animations, fancy transitions etc, 99.99% of Powerpoint presentations end up being much more static than a good chalkboard lecture.
There is also another thing that I believe is nicely illustrated by your example. Experts on human learning seem to agree that people learn better if the environment in which they study changes. Which means that a lecturer should every once a while change his or her presentation style. Using slides one day and chalkboard another day, perhaps depending on topic that is covered, can definitely help your students to learn. Too many professors have their own routine (I do too, it's just so easy to do that) they follow each lecture. Students then come to the class, make sure that everything is the way it's "supposed to be", and turn off. They make a routine out of it, too. A sudden change as the one you describe can bring them back, break their routine, and precondition (I hate that word here, but I can't think of anything better right now) them for absorbing the material better. Even if the actual delivery on that day isn't any better, at least it wakes some of the students up!
I completely agree. And that's where I see a problem with Powerpoint. Powerpoint makes it extremely easy to put few bullets on a slide, but it does very little to help you present things like charts, graphs, equations etc in a clear manner. It is not easy to make a diagram that gets revealed step by step, it is not easy to selectively emphasize certain part of a graph or an equation, etc. I am not saying it is not possible in Powerpoint to do these things, but it is not easy, the software is not designed to help you with that. That's why you almost never see people using Powerpoint in that way.
But if you are just going to put couple of extremely brief bullet points on your slides, why don't you just write them on the board? Do you even need powerpoint for that?
Forget water! Think about all the limestone!
? of speak you that "S parens" those are What
are there no other languages designed for extending other applications?
Yes, about zillion od them. My impression is that lua is more powerful than s-lang, easier to learn than scheme, and smaller and more portable than ruby/python/perl.
I remember back in the old DOS days, I had a menu software that heavily relied on this behavior. You would start a batch file, which would invoke the menu program. You would select something from the menu, it would get written into the batch file on the next line after the menu, followed by another line that would restart the batch file again. Then the menu program would exit, passing control back to the batch file.
Did you try Gnumeric? It seems like a logical fit with Abiword. I works pretty well on Windows, except that printing is still messed up on some printers. It prints fine on most printers, but there seem to be several HP printers that gnumeric cannot handle. I don't really use it for statistics, I use R or Python if I have to, but I heard that it is better than excel in that aspect.
Actually, equation editor is one of the few things I absolutely cannot figure out. I mean I can produce equations with it, but it seems like a real pain, and I think I must be doing something wrong. I always tought that microsoft equation editor was the worst possible way to create math equation and formulas. Once I had a part time job working for a textbook publisher, where I had to enter a lot of equation with MS word, and I was cursing it all the way through. However, I now believe that OO's equation editor is even worse that what microsoft came up with
/usr/bin, please!
MS does not make you pay extra for equation editor. I think what confuses you is that there is a more powerful version available from a third party, which you have to pay for. I never used it, but people tell me that it is quite good. Supposedly you can even enter LaTeX formulas into it. I would like to see how it compares to LyX.
I personaly use TeX for everything these days. If you are using Windows, give the proTeXt distribution a try. The cd comes with installers for most of the software you need (possibly all, I believe I only had to install Vim that was not included, but you may not need that), and it has an interesting pdf based installation. Basically, you pop in the cd, open a pdf file from it if it doesn't autostart, and follow instructions on the screen. Seemed pretty easy to me. Head over to http://www.tug.org/protext/ and give it a try.
Also, if you are a TUG member, they mail you a proTeXt cd with the latest version every year.
And getting versions and filepaths of anything lined up on Windows is a nightmare. Windows is just a mess in this aspect. One day, when I have nothing to do, I am going to count how many different copies of slightly different versions of Python I have on my work computer. I positively know that there are at least three different versions of ghostsctipt on that machine, and when I need to process some postscript file, I never quite know which one of them is going to start. Just give me good old
There, end of rant.
Maybe it wasn't exactly CmdrTaco's fault. The piece is so badly written that it's almost unreadable. Aforementioned my ass! I wouldn't blame CmdrTaco for using totally misleading headline, I blame him for simply posting this crap at all!
Since when is criticism equal to hate?
So shut up or leave are the only options? One isn't alowed to criticise what one sees as a problem in a country one loves, perhaps in hope it will get rectified once enough people point it out? I find your attitude rather similar to that of many hard-line communists. Besides, we are talking about malware created in the US, not targeted to the US.
I think you are onto something here. Looking at all the different countries that could be classified as superpowers in their time makes me think that the length of the time a country remains a superpower must be inversely proportional to the average IQ of its citizens.
I agree, but processes like selective breding are usually much slower, which gives us more time to react to possible problems.
The main problem I have with GM plants and animals is not so much possible toxicity, that's something you can always test for. What I am afraid of is creating new "invasive" plants and animals and introducing them into the environment. There are already enough problems with moving plants and animals between continents. I think the last thing we want to do is creating new possibly invasive organisms, especially those that are designed to be more resistant against natural predators and other hardships.
"Science: New Species Of Great Cat Found 17 of 15 comments"
What the heck? Is that a new species of math?
That was my first reaction, too. Gnome releases used to come with nice detailed release notes, but this time I simply couldn't find them. Very disapointing!
No, it's there, but you are hallucinating and it looks like Sensible World of Soccer.
...artistic works deserving of praise.
In that case, nethack is clearly missing from the list.
Is there any way to guarantee that? I mean in the standard itself?
That's only true in countries currently ruled by the right wing. In socialist countries, it's the right wing that wants change. Besides, liberals is not the same as left wing. In many countries, those who call themselves liberals support free market, minimal intervention of government in economy etc. These people are typically right of the center, or even right wing. Similarly, concervative does not necesarily mean right wing. I think the term "conservative communist" speaks for itself.
What about someone like me who is more willing to use Linux, because it is what I have always used (not completely true, I did use DOS before Linux for a brief period of time, plus several weird mainfraim operating systems, but not really enough for it to count)?
then it should be painfully obvious that if you wish to correct this "shortage" of talent, you'll need to up the pay scale of math and science teachers to make it an attractive career choice.
The reason I don't like it is this: right now, being "certified" as a math teacher brings a great competitive advantage when looking for a job in education. As a result, there are crowds of complete morons who hate math, are really bad at it, but are trying to get through a series of college math classes to get a certification that they can teach math. I happen to teach some of these classes. Typically, out of 30 people in the class, there are two who are actually interested in math. It gets slightly better in higher level classes, but still, there are enough of these idiots to "poison" the entire class. They will never be good math teachers, you need to be interested in the subject and know it well enough in order to be a good teacher. They are just making it incredibly painful not only for the instructors, but especially for the few students who are in the class because they want to learn something. And I am affraid that with these salary advantages for math teachers, things will get even worse.